The Shelf: Adventures in Extreme Reading Book Review
As many of my reviews proclaim, this particular book has been one I've wanted to read for years. I take had no luck tracking down Phyllis Rose's The Shelf: Adventures in Extreme Reading in 3 local library systems, and accept never seen a re-create in a new bookshop, so I decided to buy a relatively inexpensive secondhand copy to settle down with – at last.
Rose has written a lot of non-fiction titles which interest me, and she also edits the Norton Volume of Women's Lives. Her reading career, she tells usa early on, has been spent chasing tomes from different syllabuses. Here, notwithstanding, she decided to commence on a project which was a fiddling different, deciding to 'read like an explorer'. She chose the New York Society Library, of which she is a member, and selected a shelf of fiction – authors LEQ to LES – which met her rather strict guidelines. She then read her way through it, in no particular order as she wished to requite herself 'complete freedom'. The Shelf details her experience.
Rose wanted to steer a course away from the usual ways in which readers observe their next books; her intention here was to 'read my way into the unknown – into the pathless wastes, into thin air, with no reviews, no bestseller lists, no higher curricula, no National Book Awards or Pulitzer Prizes, no ads, no publicity, not even word of mouth to guide me.' She goes on to say: 'Permit me, I idea, if only for a alter, choose my reading nearly blindly. Who knows what I volition find?'
The guidelines which Rose ready herself made information technology relatively hard to locate a unmarried shelf from which to read. She perused near 200 of them before she plant one which fit her criteria. On reflection, she notes: 'Visually, the shelf I had focused on was a pleasing mix of old-way bindings, gold-stamped library-jump hardcovers, and modern books whose colorful jackets were wrapped in Mylar.'
As one would await, what Rose found from her shelf was incredibly varied in topic and writer. She selected her shelf based on a classic which she had never read but wanted to – Mikhail Lermontov'southward A Hero of Our Time (my review of which can be found here). Her project introduced her to books well-nigh French Canadian farmers, upper-class Austrians, and detectives working in California.
Rose reflects: 'The first affair I learned from my experiment – aside from the weakness of my will or, by the same token, the strength of my impulse toward enjoyment – was that in the age of the Net, it is very hard to stick with a book without consulting an exterior source. Reading is more centrifugal than information technology used to exist.' She too notes that prefaces can irrevocably modify the reading feel; specifically for her, this revolves around Vladimir Nabokov's introduction to Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, which robbed her of whatsoever excitement, and added diverting, and sometimes unnecessary, comments to the reading experience.
1 of the most interesting elements of The Shelf, bated from the general thought backside it, are the varied differences which Rose writes about between differing translations of the same book. During her project, she came to three versions of A Hero of Our Time, one of which she did non savour, and one of which thrilled her. Throughout, Rose wonders most and researches the authors and books on her shelf, many of which are new to her. She even strikes up a couple of friendships with contemporary women authors.
I really similar the key idea in The Shelf, and it is 1 which I would love to personally replicate – although with simply a local library branch at my disposal, I'yard not certain I would come beyond an entire shelf which fully interested me. The chances of reading mainly bestsellers and popular fiction in a local library setting would, of course, be far college than Rose encountered in her individual library, which has been in existence in New York since 1754. Regardless, The Shelf was an incredibly enjoyable, and rather fresh experiment, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Rose's crisp prose, and the curiosity which she displays at all times, balanced the whole wonderfully.
Source: https://theliterarysisters.wordpress.com/2021/11/11/non-fiction-november-the-shelf-adventures-in-extreme-reading-by-phyllis-rose/
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